MerryGoRound
by cagd
Summary: We all know about Penn, but about the people that Liam sired when he was alive? Liam's behavior rebounds on Angel high atop the Wolfram & Hart building...
1. Chapter 1

_It all began one hot L.A. afternoon with a UPS truck as El Nino threatened to break loose overhead… no, it began… it began…_

_It began with a horse._

_A horse._

_A rope._

_And the roar of a flintlock pistol._

_The horse lay screaming in the mud of an Irish field one damp afternoon; both front legs broken trying to struggle back to its feet._

_A shot crashed through the animal's screams; the horse went limp, twitching, a lead ball in its brain._

_And Liam, son of a wealthy merchant, covered with the mud of an Irish field from where the horse had thrown him, holstered his weapon while kicking thoughtfully at the frayed remains of a rope stretched between two gateposts, and laughed._


	2. Chapter 2

_20—, Los Angeles, midnight, penthouse level of the W&H building, LA branch:_

"Hello? Who is this?"

"I know I promised we'd never bother you again."

"What is it?"

"Jezebel's on the loose again. She just called from L.A. to let me know she was all right. She says she's got unfinished business in LA."

"Thanks."

"For all I know she's… well, you know Jezebel - no, you don't - I owe you a warning: my sister's out your way."

"How'd you get this number?"

"One of your ads, Wolfram & Hart's… it sounds stupid, but I saw you in one of the office shots… sorry to bother you…" (dial tone)


	3. Chapter 3

_The horse cost Liam's father nearly a year's profits in the purchasing._

_Someone had to pay for it._

_The tenant farmer in whose field the accident happened was brought up before the village magistrate._

_Lounging in the courtroom doorway, Liam found the look of terror on the peasant's face amusing; more so than the one on the man's face whenever Liam deliberately led his wild friends across the his fields, fine hunters trampling the young barley into the mud with geese and chickens scattering in a burst of panicked feathers. Because the man was Liam's father's tenant, he didn't dare complain or he and his ten children with another one on the way might be evicted, to starve in the ditch – how comical! _

_And the man's wife and children? It was side-splitting, the way they huddled together watching her man in the dock, the snot-nosed babby crying, the wee ones all trying to hide behind their ma'm's threadbare skirts at once while the older ones with their dirty faces and blank eyes shuffled barefoot and ragged… how entertaining!!!_

"_Yes," the magistrate agreed, "The loss of your son's fine horse must be paid for."_

_Consulting his ledger, Liam's father named a sum._

_The tenant buried his face in his hands, his wife moaned; Liam laughed aloud as the baby started hiccupping._

_The magistrate in his black robes and heavy white wig solomnly agreed; the loss of such a valuable animal must be compensated for._

_The tenant pleaded that he couldn't pay, he could make a payment at the end of the harvest, but it would have to be a small one, "I beg yehs, I have wee ones what need feeding…"_

_By now, Liam's sides hurt and his father's face was like thunder._

_The magistrate ordered the farmer to sell his cows and pigs to make the payment – his landlord's property had been destroyed, it must be replaced._

_Agony in his voice, the tenant pleaded that his cows and pigs were all he had._

_The magistrate slammed his gavel, and said to Liam's father, "I suggest you evict them my good sir, and bring in tenants that will bring in a higher rent to make up for the price of the dead hunter."_

_Screaming, the farmer's wife threw her apron over her face as her neighbors rushed to comfort her._

_By now Liam was all but in tears from laughing._

_Then the village priest, a busybody who frequently scolded Liam for his vicious ways stepped forward and ruined the comedy set up for Liam's sole amusement. The two conferred, staring at the wailing tenant's wife. His father, appeased approached the bench._

_The magistrate leaned down from his high wooden stand and listened to what Liam's father had to say._

_Finally he straightened, banged his gavel once more and announced, "All complaints shall be dropped should the defendant provide a member of his household to act as a servant to his landlord until said debt has been paid, and not one day more."_

_Liam never heard this verdict. Bored, he'd stepped out for a pint and the tavern wench delivering it._


	4. Chapter 4

Angel studied the files which now littered the polished surface of his desk like so many fallen leaves; leaves that held a story which began once upon a time in the late 18th century, starting out small, small enough for Liam and then Angelus to have forgotten. Angel only remembered it when the story came back to bite him on the ass during last year's El Nino… 

There was the sound of his office door opening. Angel looked up as Spike dropped into one of the chairs that faced his desk and propped his boots on the gleaming surface.

Irritated, Angel pushed them off. They left a mark.

Spike put them back on and then slowly pulled them off as Angel stood up, came around the monolithic desk and loomed over him.

"So, what's it this time?" Spike looked up at him insolently. "Need me to clean up after you again?" He paused, scratching at the angry red line on both wrists no thanks to Dana's no-prisoners approach to manicures, "Sorry mate, no can do – booked solid."

Angel handed Spike a photograph, "Find this person. She's a journalist."

"_Booked solid._ Plus, you owe me for the trip over here; seeing as you won't let me have a car." Spike turned the image over and read the handwriting on the back: "Had to take the bus – Jezebel the Journalist, eh? Gonna like _this_ job…" He smirked at Angel and started scratching at his wrists again. "Should I feel like taking it on."

Angel resisted the urge to slap Spike on the back of the head and said, "I want her in this office by sunrise tomorrow morning."

"If I don't?" Scratch, scratch, _scratch_.

"You won't like it."

"Big threat there." Scratch, scratch, _scratch_.

"I mean it."

"What's in it for me?" Scratch, scratch, scratch… _tug_.

"I won't rip you head off and use it for a golf ball in the upcoming company tournament."

Spike considered Angel's offer as he pulled out a suture and examined it, "Your Fred told me these are supposed to dissolve in the wound. She lied." He deliberately flicked it onto the carpet, followed by two more, "Car?"

"Only if you get out of here _right now_."

"The GTX?"

"A Camero."

Spike gave Angel an insolent look and then shrugged as he shoved the photo into one of his duster pockets, "Reasonable lookin' bird- if you like the type."

Angel glared at him, "Out."

"All right Peaches, I'm going. I'm going."

The door closed behind Spike, leaving Angel with the files and the story they told.

Angel sat there a long time staring at them before pushing a button on his intercom: "Harmony, get in here. Bring a vacuum cleaner."


	5. Chapter 5

_Moira was small, half-starved, and slept in the attic with the rest of the maids when she wasn't cleaning the fireplaces and blackening boots before sunrise when she wasn't scouring pots. The tenant's daughter moved like a threadbare ghost through the fine house, hands raw from scrubbing the floors, hair bound under a dingy linen cap that was one step from the rag bag, and shoes two sizes too big for her so that they curled up at the toes where there were no toes to hold them down._

_Dead horse forgotten, she held no interest for Liam, who preferred blondes with a bit of meat on their bones, until one long rainy day when he was half-heartedly balancing the ledgers his father laid so much store in._

_Accounting was boring._

_Doodling in the margins was far more interesting, so Liam lost himself in the swirls and curls that flowed from the end of his Venetian glass pen so that when he paused to dip his pen in the silver inkwell beside the ledger, he met a pair of intense hazel eyes in a pinched face._

"_What." Liam paused, pen suspended above paper._

_Moira stood there fidgeting, ash pail in one hand, shovel in the other, eyes fixed on his pen._

"_What?" he'd said louder; this was even more boring than the numbers before him._

_Finally she'd pointed at the pen with the ash shovel, "Tha'."_

"_That what?"_

_She fidgeted more. The clock in the hall bonged two. _

"_Ourself wants to do tha'."_

"_What, write?"_

_A long nervous silence…_

_Then very quietly, "Aye."_

_Liam stared at the slavey with her chapped knuckles and scraggly red braids. This little bit of nothing wanted to write? Why? What would she do with it? Keep a record of how many dishes she'd washed?_

_Liam laughed at this absurdity; Moira fled, bucket in one hand and shovel in the other, shoes clattering irregularly on the waxed floor._


	6. Chapter 6

One bar. 

One hundred bars.

Demon bars. Human bars.

Look in enough bars, and you'll eventually find what you're after.

Plus, it didn't hurt to set up tabs in every one of them under Angel's name - bloody hell, it wasn't like Peaches couldn't afford it- Spike'd been right too: he found the skinny little redhead in a biker dive where asphalt met desert and the floor was a solid mass of peanut shells and dog ends sometime 'round sunrise. Too bad she hadn't used up all the mace on the g-!-lack who'd sat down next to her, and snarled: "You don't belong here, _half-breed_."

Angel's journalist calmly pulled out a canister from a holster on her hip and sprayed the g-!-lack, who fell off the barstool to hit the butt littered floor with a crash,

She then took a pull of beer from the bottle in front of her before looking down at the g-!-lack (who was clawing at all ten eyes) and said, "_One-thirty second._ If you're gonna be racist, get your insults right."

Grinning, Spike'd stepped over the g-!-lack! and parked it on the recently abandoned stool.

Jezebel gave him a guarded look as he slid one of Peaches' business cards towards her.

After looking at the card and then looking at Spike, she maced him, "You stole that."

Spike staggered into the men's room trying not to scream, feeling lucky that he'd ducked in time to avoid being blinded.


	7. Chapter 7

_Moira was a fast learner, Liam discovered after he'd called her back._

_Anyway teaching a slavey how to write her name was more amusing than doodling or adding up columns of numbers – the look of concentration on her thin face as her hand made the loops and whorls of "M" over and over again was droll._

_This was how his father found them, Liam coaxing Moira through the complexities of "cow"._

"_Liam! You call yourself a Christian?" the man roared down at them, "Letting her think she'll be more than a slavey when the likes of her never will? Look at this! Look! At! This! She's soiled my ledger!"_

_So Liam went into the wine cellar and got drunk to show his father exactly what he thought of servants, Christians and ledgers._

_Moira was sent to the cellar to fill a pitcher for the evening table. _

_Liam raped her._


	8. Chapter 8

At two in the afternoon, Angel received a call that ended with him getting on the company jet and heading for Saudi Arabia, files in his attaché. 


	9. Chapter 9

_The pregnancy didn't show until the sixth month. Moira reluctantly admitted who the father was._

_Liam laughed when his father confronted him. That wee bit of nothing? What did his father take him for? More likely the gardener did the dirty deed._

_Liam's father, not wanting the scandal of an unwed mother in a decent household confronted the gardener._

"_Nossir, not me!" Seeing as the gardener was already married, the scandal remained- with Moira stubbornly clinging to Liam as the father._

_Liam's father had plans for Liam - marrying a penniless tenant's daughter was bad for business - Liam's father consulted the priest._

_There were places in Galwaytown, places where wicked girls were sent to repent and give birth out of the sight of decent folk. The priest would take care of it as he had all the others._

_Moira disappeared before she could be sent away to repent her wickedness in the coarse robes of a novice even as Liam, after a final argument with his father, stole his sister's trousseau for the money it would bring, and took the road to Galwaytown himself; free at last of all ledgers, priests, and responsibility._


	10. Chapter 10

By the fifth drink, Jezebel seemed almost inclined to go with Spike. 

After the seventh, she stood up saying, "Well, if that's the way Liam wants it, then let's stop fuckin' 'round and get to it."

Jezebel staggered against Spike, righted herself, shook her head, and slurred as she leaned against him, "Gimme minute, floor won't stay put."

"Hell pet," Spike said as he steadied her, "Take a bloody hour or six for all I care. Peaches'll keep."

By now the sting from the macing Jezebel'd given him earlier was a dull ache. Or was that the Bourbon kicking in?

Jezebel straightened, pulling away from him, "Don't wanna, but what the hell!"


	11. Chapter 11

_Child of rape, Darina had everything Moira never had even if it meant burning in Hell forever for lying to the good sisters at the Galwaytown convent where Liam's unwanted child was born._

_Husband? "Why yes'm, I've a man. He be whaler. We be married in the Church in me village this last year."_

_The sisters believed her._

_Later, it was, "Me man be kilt on whaling ship. Poor widow I be wi' babby."_

_The sisters believed this too, so Darina was allowed to go to the convent school as a boarder when she was old enough while Moira worked her fingers to the bone scrubbing floors by day and whoring at night to pay her child's tuition._


	12. Chapter 12

The Saudis had been difficult. No, the tribe of Djann who really owned the oil rights to the entire region, were difficult. And they didn't like Angel all that much, either. Still, a settlement had been reached. Back aboard the company jet somewhere over Japan, Angel sorted through a stack of photocopied ledger entries dating back to the 1700s: Moira had managed to get Darina's tuition reduced in return for mending altar cloths and vestments. There was a bill for a tiny length of fine India muslin and the thread to sew it into a little girl's dress. Beneath was another for a tiny pair of white shoes and fine silk stockings - there were no bills for anything a grown woman would need in the entire lot. 

Angel sat there, eyes closed for a long time before he made a few calls on his cell: Rodeo Drive had an eccentric clientele; a call at 2 a.m. long after most of the shops were closed wasn't terribly out of the ordinary.


	13. Chapter 13

_Angelus picked up a prostitute to take the edge off his appetite – there was a roister-doister in a leading townsmen's house tonight which he and Darla intended to crash; this scrawny wee thing with her absurdly large shoes and limp red hair was just the thing. _

_She seemed docile enough until his jaws closed down on her throat; that was when the little slut stabbed him in the back._

_Angelus' fangs cut into the soft skin beneath her ear; her knife cut deeper, burning as it sliced. Awkwardly he clutched at the blade before falling to his knees in the filth of the alleyway, hunger forgotten as he beat her to death; the satisfying crunch of her breaking bones accentuating the burning agony in his back._

_Later in their lodgings above the best tavern in Galwaytown, Darla pulled the blade from Angelus' back: it was a silver spoon from his dead family's collection of plate, honed to a deadly point._


	14. Chapter 14

There were Naga labor disputes in India to deal with; a conference call with Lorne over a certain athlete's golf scores, Fred needed him to sign something… 

After lunch, Angel shuffled through a stack of photocopies of old ledger entries for goods and services from the early 18th century – Wolfram & Hart's archives were detailed. A painted miniature of a dark-haired child with large brown eyes fell out. Kathy?

No, Darina.


	15. Chapter 15

_At ten, Darina with her angelic face, dark eyes, and darker curls towered over her tiny mother as they made their way through the better streets of Galwaytown on Sunday promenade after morning Mass._

_Moira, twenty-three, looked sixty, easily mistaken for an elderly eccentric relation in her badly fitting dress and second-hand shoes compared to her pretty child._

_Darina didn't care; though the convent school was warm and secure and full of her beloved books, the Sunday outing was anticipated every week with growing excitement. Her mother had to know all her lessons, so Darina would recite them as they walked past all the fine houses with the fine folk in them, her mother listening intently as they shared a small bag of boiled sweets._

_They would then climb the stairs to her mother's small room at the back of a shop that sold gloves and as her mother carefully mended fraying altar cloths, Moira would sing for her. Later they would eat bread and cheese, and as the shadows lengthened, her mother would walk her back to the convent school for six more days of lessons with a pretty tucked into her hand, a fan, a doll, a sweet._

_This Sunday, her mother didn't come._


	16. Chapter 16

Angel leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling. 


	17. Chapter 17

_The countryside around Galway was strange to Darina – having never left the streets of Galwaytown. The money had run out at the convent school and the sisters had somehow found her mother's family._

_Which was unsettling; Darina didn't know she had family._

_Nor they, she._

_Still, they made room for her in the crowded little cottage, where she was surrounded with more family than she'd dreamed possible: aunts, uncles, cousins, babies, and toddlers, who stared at the little girl with her immaculate white shoes and gloves._

_Darina stared back at these dirty red-haired strangers before bursting into tears. Where was mother?_

_The bent old woman everyone called gran embraced Darina and held her on her lap by the smoking peat fire well into the night, the bundle of letters and schoolbooks that had come with Darina tucked away in a corner, forgotten and unread._


	18. Chapter 18

Angel told Harmony over the intercom that he wasn't to be disturbed before he picked up a copy of a parish register. The priest at this time had terrible handwriting. Angel sipped at a lukewarm mug of pig's blood… there it was, two pages from Darina's Confirmation, her wedding. 

It was scratched out.


	19. Chapter 19

_At sixteen, Darina towered over even the tallest man in the village. Though she could read and write, no man wanted a bride bigger than he so when the miller, an elderly miser with a wicked temper approached her gran, Darina swallowed her pride and agreed to a match._

"_Better married than a spinster."_

_Trying to be happy for her gran's sake, Darina let her female relations weave flowers into her long brown curls and along with her family and her groom walked the distance to the village chapel with what little she owned in a basket: old school books and a letter from her dead mother that she'd never had the heart to open._

_Within sight of the chapel, Darina heard a marvelous song that no other heard. She tossed aside her bouquet, ran through a gap in the hedge and in front of half the village, disappeared in broad daylight in the middle of Padraig O'Meara's sheep meadow on her wedding day._


	20. Chapter 20

Angel frowned. Fifty years later Darina's name appeared next to that of an infant – Colleena - stitched into a ledger from the Galwaytown offices of Wolfram & Hart. 

The mother was described as tall and dark, a near-angelic beauty of seventeen in strange green robes, who wouldn't let anyone touch her odd-looking red-haired infant. An agent of Wolfram & Hart rescued them from stoning in a nearby village. The villagers claimed that the baby was a changeling, and the mother a witch.

Mother and daughter disappeared before a representative from Wolfram & Hart's London office could come claim them.


	21. Chapter 21

_Darina died of fever in the slums of Boston, weeping for a lover nobody knew, singing songs in a language that nobody recognized, and the letter passed down to Colleena, her odd little daughter, who regarded anything made of iron with terror and spoke to things that weren't there._

_Wolfram & Hart missed collecting Collena by two days, Colleena having disappeared into the New England countryside without a trace. _


	22. Chapter 22

Angel picked up Colleena's trail in St. Louis a few years later, as did Wolfram & Hart – in jail for prostitution and petty theft. Wolfram & Hart's local representative got her off, only to have her disappear once more... where the hell was Spike? 

Harmony placed a pile of packages from an exclusive dress shop on the corner of his desk; Angel dismissed her with a grunt, reading until it was time to attend a power lunch with Gunn.


	23. Chapter 23

_In a Ste. Genevive, Missouri tavern, Colleena gave birth to a daughter, father unknown, Mary. Again she slipped Wolfram & Hart's grasp.  
_

_Another entry mentioned that Mary gave birth to Susan, father unknown, in the Eastern Missouri Ozarks fifteen years before the Civil War began. (Susan watched her mother die after stepping on an iron nail, the poison spreading up her leg inch by inch until it reached her heart and stopped it.)_

_Local rumor had it that Susan was raped by a gang of Union deserters who disappeared without a trace the next morning. Charity was born nine months later, small, odd, and red of hair._

_Susan and Charity disappeared into the Ozarks, before briefly appearing in a St. Louis newspaper's wildly exxagerated account about a pair of so-called hill witches who could call down lightning at will. _

_Later a sheriff's report hinted that Susan's daughter gave birth to Erline nine months after a minister tumbled terrified from her bedroom window, fleeing something he didn't want to talk about. Thirty years later Charity was struck by lightning on a clear day after cursing a neighbor for letting his cattle get into her corn crib._

_The less said about Erline the better. She named her daughter Rachel._

_Rachel, tall, dark, mannish and strong gave birth to Lucy while working in a Route 66 motel and doing more than just cleaning rooms. By now Wolfram & Hart merely stood back and watched, even after Lucy gave birth to a girl, Jezebel, nine months after giving birth to a dark-haired boy, father unknown. _

_Jezebel's father was an overweight telephone company pole climber, known for his large appetite and unfussy libido._


	24. Chapter 24

Angel dug down to a layer of old school records from the early 1970s... where the hell was Spike? 


	25. Chapter 25

_Jezebel and the boy, Johnny, were called "The Twins" by their hillbilly neighbors and didn't go to school until they were nearly nine, which was when the county truant officer realized that the reclusive all-female household out on Route 66 had children in it._

_The law was the law, they had to go to school. One morning they arrived at the edge of the big brick schoolhouse's playground, flinching at the passing cars, Jezebel in a faded but clean sunbonnet and flour sack dress and Johnny in patched overalls – barefoot and carrying tin lunch pails from a long gone age._

_Surrounded by curious children, they huddled together until a teacher rescued them. But not before Jezebel flattened the County Commissioner's little girl for jeering at her brother's bare feet._


End file.
